Work Text:
When Xie Lian was young, he was rich. His parents had made a lot of money, and for his entire life, Xie Lian was surrounded by extravagance. But the moment he learned that not everyone lived this way, he had a goal in mind.
Save the common people.
When Xie Lian was 17, he found a boy on the streets, clothes dirtied, bandages across his right eye, clearly starving. Xie Lian took that boy home.
“What’s your name?” Xie Lian asked after the boy finished eating what Xie Lian had given him.
The boy looked up, his eyes sparkling. “Honghong-er.”
Xie Lian blinked. “Honghong-er?”
Honghong-er nodded. “I… never got a real name.”
Xie Lian immediately felt sorry for the boy. “You can come up with your own someday,” he said. “Everyone deserves a name.”
Honghong-er’s eyes lit up even more. “Thank you, gege!”
Eventually, Honghong-er would run away, after an accident that somehow involved fire. Xie Lian didn’t remember him too well, but Honghong-er always remembered Xie Lian.
Years later, Xie Lian’s parents lost all their money and died a few years after that. Xie Lian lived in a small home by himself. Pretty much no one knew that he used to be well-off, and Xie Lian preferred it that way. He was fine the way he was. And though it wasn’t as easy as before to help people, he still did the best he could.
One day, as he was walking home after buying groceries, he felt a gun press up against his head. “Xie Lian,” the man with the gun said. “Too bad your parents are dead, or I would’ve killed them instead. But you will have to do.”
Xie Lian tried to keep his breath steady. “Can we talk about this instead?”
“No more talking,” the man said, about to shoot.
And then Xie Lian heard the sound of a gunshot, but it wasn’t from the man’s gun. The man screamed in pain and fell down. Xie Lian looked behind him to see a second man dressed in red with an eyepatch covering his right eye. The second man had shot the first in the leg.
“Gege,” the second man said with a smile.
“Hua Cheng!” the first man screamed. “You bastard!”
The second man, Hua Cheng, gave the first a dismissive look, then walked up to Xie Lian. “You’re safe now,” he said.
It wasn’t until much later that Xie Lian found out that Hua Cheng was Honghong-er.
He knew that Hua Cheng was rich and suspected to have dealings in the black market, but he had never thought much about Hua Cheng until the man saved him. After that, they ended up interacting a lot. Months later, Xie Lian found out—purely by accident, Hua Cheng would never have told him by himself—that Hua Cheng had been Honghong-er.
A few days after that, Xie Lian confessed to Hua Cheng that he was in love with him. The two of them got together.
Xie Lian was happy.